Promises, promises

Dec 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Dave Plank

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Networks & Systems

It may be every firefighter's dream to have real-time 3-D walkthroughs of a fire in progress, streaming video from inside a building or dynamic floor plans that show hot-spot locations, but real-life needs are far simpler. Knowing exactly where a firefighter is inside a building is great, experts say, but it would be almost as good — not to mention more technologically feasible — to put information on what else might be inside a building at crews' fingertips, such as stored chemicals, flammable-gas tanks and other noxious materials.

As long as 10 years ago, emergency responders were hearing extravagant promises about the avalanche of information that would be available to them as they sped to an event, said mobile-data expert Todd Wilkerson. Live video, prior history of incident locations and real-time GIS information were just the tip of the iceberg, and technical issues were talked about as an afterthought — if they were talked about at all.

“The hard part was supposed to be sorting out the necessary stuff from what wasn't needed,” Wilkerson said. “We were all thinking that the limitations would be collecting and choosing the data to be exported to users. We didn't realize that we'd still be dealing with antenna and interference issues.”

Wilkerson said the slower-than-expected rollout of services that would serve firefighters and other emergency workers mirrors similar delays in other fields, such as warehousing and fleet management. In each case, he said, nagging technical problems, combined with the complexity of deciding what information is most needed by users, have slowed down progress.

“A firefighter needing to know what's in a building and what truck or piece of equipment to send there is fundamentally the same as a fleet manager trying to figure out where to send which 18-wheeler,” Wilkerson said. “In both cases you have to know what you have, what there is where you're going, and how to pull things together as quickly and economically as possible.”

Some of the delays in offering firefighters what computer scientists call a rich data environment are purely technical, such as the power and line-of-sight requirements for most data signals and the time and expense inherent in setting up a data network at the scene. Even with the advent of mesh networking of handhelds, however, most of the information firefighters get about their surroundings comes the old-fashioned way, over the radio from incident command. Dispatchers ask questions of the reporting party, such as what the building is used for and whether there are hazardous materials present, then relay that information via radio to scene commanders, who pass it on.

This approach presents problems with which all firefighters are familiar: The caller doesn't know what's on the premises or doesn't stay on the line long enough to say; workers in one part of a sprawling industrial building have no idea what goes on in another part; or the building is being used for illicit purposes and the reporting party has no incentive to be honest about what's there. Combine the lack of good initial knowledge with site-specific technical issues, such as interference from nearby radio transmitters or structural impairments, and firefighters can find themselves headed into a situation with blinders on.

“It's great to be able to account for your people on the scene, no question,” said Don Carnahan, who recently retired after 25 years as a firefighter in California and now does training and consulting. “But the next level of that usefulness is going to be when we start to have on-demand access to information about a location and can make decisions about how to approach a situation on the fly.”

Carnahan says that in his years as a firefighter he faced many situations where a little more advance knowledge could have altered an outcome.

“I can't think of a time when lives were lost because of something we might have known, thank God,” Carnahan said. “But I've seen a few buildings be totally lost because we didn't know about something inside, or we had to wait on some piece of information before we could make an entry. That happens every day.”

Carnahan said the kind of information that might be most useful — building plans, materials-storage permits and the like — often are available in fire department files but can be punched up on a mobile terminal far less often.

“If you're on your way to a scene and the location has a permit for handling something hazardous, wouldn't that be great to know up front?” Carnahan said. “Most often, [responders] get to a scene, have a look around, and if they think there may be something there, they'll radio a dispatcher to look into it. That wastes time.”

Again, the information that is available at a responder's fingertips depends on decisions made far in advance of an event, Wilkerson said.

“We still face a limited landscape in terms of the migration of paper data to electronic data,” he said. “Lots of city offices and even fire departments have paper copies of all their permits but no good way of going through them electronically. And even if you're asking a dispatcher to move over one terminal — from a dispatch console to a computer where they can look up location information — that's time lost compared to being able to do it all remotely, say from a mobile terminal in a pumper truck or a command unit."